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The power of the humanities & a challenge to humanists.

Article Excerpt
The humanities protect and give life to our most enduring values. The very DNA of civilization is encoded in the poet's song, the painter's brushstroke, and the vibrant dialogue about ideas. Although the study of the humanities cultivates the critical thought necessary for a civil society, it has suffered neglect over the last few decades, both in terms of financial support and in the national debate on education.

Among our great universities, Harvard, Chicago, Yale, and Columbia have recently redefined their general education curricula. While all four in-stitutions affirm that the purpose of a liberal education is to pursue knowledge without explicit concern for vocational utility, Harvard's Report of the Task Force on General Education emphasizes how education should relate to students' personal, social, and eventual professional lives. Specifically, the report declares, "The ambition of the program of general education ... is to enable undergraduates to put all the learning they are doing at Harvard ... in the context of the people they will be and the lives they will lead after college." (1)

General education curricula include the humanities and the sciences, both of which are considered necessary for a complete education. Yet federal funding for the humanities and the sciences has diverged significantly over the last thirty years. For example, in 1979 the dollar value of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants was five times greater than grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). By 1997, NSF grants were thirty-three times greater than NEH grants. (2) According to the NSF's 2005 annual Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, total spending for science and engineering research and development was almost $46 billion. (3) Even given the most generous estimate, humanities research and development expenditures did not exceed $1 billion in 2005.

Of course, it is difficult to compare funding between the sciences and the humanities, as much of this disparity can be explained by the high costs of scientific research. Nevertheless, through omission or commission, the value of the humanities is diminished on most scales of measurement. Moreover, the growing inequality is symptomatic of a much deeper misunderstanding of the role of the humanities in education. The U.S. Department of Education's 2006 report on the future of higher education, which addresses the decline in U.S. higher education, focuses almost exclusively on math and the sciences. The report stresses that academic programs must serve the changing needs of a knowledge economy, and it recommends that universities develop "new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies to improve learning, particularly in the area of science and mathematical literacy." (4) If we use this assessment of the educational demands of a knowledge economy in conjunction with the rationale for the Harvard curriculum changes as a barometer for the climate of funding, we can reasonably infer that the humanities lag so far behind the sciences, in part, because it is unclear how humanistic inquiry and critical thinking relate to the world of everyday life.

Generally speaking, the humanities consist of languages and literatures, the arts, (5) history, (6) music, linguistics, and philosophy. While the exact definition of the humanities remains debated, this broad characterization offers a sense of the disciplinary diversity within the humanities. The common ground of such disparate fields of inquiry is critical thinking, that Socratic habit of articulating questions and gathering relevant information in order to make reasonable judgments. Although similar arguments could be mounted in other traditions. I am consciously confining myself to the Western tradition for the purposes of this discussion.

The rebirth of classicism in fourteenth-century Italy helped to revitalize the tradition of critical thinking. Petrarch's preference for the classical rhetoric of Cicero and the language of Virgil over the "barbarous inventions" of medieval Latin led to the search for lost texts in monastic libraries across Europe. (7) Deploring medieval scholasticism's failure to convey essential truths persuasively, Petrarch's return to classical eloquence was a pragmatic appeal. He argued that logic and metaphysics may help us to define the nature of virtue, but only poetry and metaphor move us to become virtuous. (8)

Although the influence of classical thought is evident in late medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas and Dante, this Petrarchan return to original sources not only generated a new appreciation for the critical thought of antiquity, but shed light on textual discrepancies long buried by church authorities. According to a document known as the Donation of Constantine, the Emperor Constantine had granted political authority over the Roman Empire to Pope Silvester in the fourth century. In 1440, the gifted Latinist and early humanist Lorenzo Valla proved that the Donation was an early medieval forgery. (9) Contrasting it with the rhetoric of contemporaneous Roman law, Valla demonstrated that the Donation was inconsistent with Latin of the fourth century, thus proving it was written centuries after its alleged creation. This triumph of textual criticism...

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